RIP, DEI: The End of Our Captivity

Yes, a captivity. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (hereafter, DEI) can properly be called a captivity.  Americans were held hostage by this alien ideology born in the claustrophobic classrooms of the Marxist credo for decades. Its noose has finally loosened. 

So enveloping was this agitprop that the commanding heights of academe and conventional intelligentsia cast aside outdated things like free speech and launched a campaign of cancel culture, the flip side of Nazi book burning. For years, average Americans crouched in fear at the ubiquity of this Enemy.

No wonder you found yourself rubbing your eyes when The Wall Street Journal recently reported:

Universities are suspending research projects, canceling conferences and closing offices in response to a volley of orders from President Trump banning “diversity, equity and inclusion” across the United States government. The directives threaten vital federal funding and have thrown university leaders into disarray.

To avoid running afoul of the orders, which include “the termination of all discriminatory programs”, some school leaders have assumed a defensive posture on anything associated with DEI.

It seemed as though we were awaking from a nightmare. We had to pinch ourselves. Was its stranglehold abating? 

But as the president severed its tentacles, the only thing he was doing was restoring simple common sense. But in the thick fog of Leftist disinformation, simple common sense begins to become uncommon. So uncommon that it soon becomes simply dangerous. Indeed, cause for arrest, as many pro-life folks discovered. Chesterton, as usual, was eerily correct when he wrote in Heretics:

The great March of destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street: it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream: it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer.

Pause for a moment and savor the depth to which we have fallen. The Leader of the Free World compelled to promulgate a formal document declaring that only two sexes exist—male and female.

Mr. Chesterton, how prescient you were!

Not to appear melodramatic, but we did seem to feel the exhilaration of prisoners of Auschwitz as they were freed.  Recall the slogan over the gates of that death camp: Arbeit macht frei (Work makes you free). And inmates heeded The Lie until they were incinerated as a reward.

Similarly, the American people over the long stretch of their captivity. Over and over, the incessant message was drummed into our ears: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Its invocation was inescapable: in workplaces, government, kindergarten classrooms, Army and Navy, Fortune 500 boardrooms, universities and high schools, legacy media, and newspapers. This perverse ideology blanketed the nation like some toxic slime, leaving the conscience and right reason of Americans teetering.

Normal folks were terrified to speak openly, lest they be overheard and dismissed from employment, or worse. Without exaggeration, conditions in America approached the days of the Stalinist Soviet Union when one out of every two citizens worked for the KGB and children routinely reported anti-party speech of their parents to its agents.

When this tale is told to your grandchildren it will beggar belief. Since most rational men will be incredulous, let us rehearse just a few of the more bizarre tenets of this corrupt and corrupting ideology:

• A guide at the University of California, Irvine, became notorious for its discouragement of the idiom “kill two birds with one stone.” The problem for UCI was not that this hoary phrase is a worn-out cliché, but rather that it employed violent language. They replaced it with the bad rhyme “feed two birds with one scone.”
• Jacinda Ardern, former prime minister of New Zealand, during the pandemic sanctimoniously announced, “We continue to be your single guardians of truth. Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth.”
• The mantra “disparate impact on black criminals” became the excuse to allow crime to run rampant. The blatant madness of the claim went unchallenged, unleashing eruptions of violence. But the irrationality of this nostrum was inescapable. For instance, if more college graduates were jailed for white-collar crime, should we cease arresting them because of “disparate impact”? If certain segments of a population are clearly seen to be committing crimes, it is not “disparate impact” to arrest them even though they represent a preponderance of a certain population.

George Orwell identified this agenda better than anybody before or since, first in essays in the 1940s and then in his novel 1984 which introduced Newspeak, a satiric lingua franca that showed how totalitarians impoverished language to crush freedom. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” says a character at the lie-infested Ministry of Truth. “In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

This beloved America of ours came close to becoming Amerika, a client wing of the Davos Global State.

Then, Trump. Like Hercules draining the Augean stables, he unleashed the full force of his presidency to allow common sense to reign again. Some may grouse that this is too much credit given to an imperfect instrument. But properly trained Catholics (a dwindling tribe) well understand that God always deploys imperfect instruments. Look at me and you.   Like Hercules draining the Augean stables, [Trump] unleashed the full force of his presidency to allow common sense to reign again.Tweet This

Goethe was right in Faust when he placed upon the lips of Mephistopheles, “I desire only evil, and accomplish only good.” In the mysterious designs of Divine Providence, this is often the way. The imitable Dom Anscar Vonier writes with the crystal clarity of the splendid Catholic modus operandi:

Goodness itself, sanctity itself, is fostered by the proximity of evil. As Saint Augustine puts it so well: it pleased God to make good come out of evil rather than to abolish all evil. God could have abolished all evil in his omnipotence; he did not; he did the better thing; he made good come out of evil, he makes sanctity come out of it; makes martyrs through the cruelty of man and gives his church the most glorious traditions of fortitude and courage through the very presence of enemies in her midst and around her walls. When the great day of harvest comes sanctity will be found to be so great and so high by very reason of the wickedness that encompassed it.

Sincere questions may come to mind.  

DEI seem like perfectly noble Catholic ideals. Diversity is, after all, an opportunity for all. Equity, simple application of justice. And, Inclusion, fair play. As with all ideologies, these otherwise honorable sentiments are twisted into new meanings. Under cover of their Old Meanings, they smuggle the malign ideology. Think carefully. Is the People’s Republic of North Korea truly a “people’s republic”? It is as much a people’s republic as Sing Sing. The key to victory for the ideologue is the manipulation of language. Trumpet the Old Words but mean the New Things. Under this clever ruse, Victor Hugo’s warning is chilling: “Invading armies can be resisted. Invading ideas cannot.”

DEI’s Diversity is a violation of human dignity. It replaces the striving essential to the human person for physical traits or skin color. Diversity accomplishes nothing less than choking off the source of human dignity, which is the cultivation of intellectual or physical aptitude. Only this permits a man to take pride in his worth because the work is his own, a fruit of a struggle for excellence. Diversity eviscerates that. In doing so, it leaves the human person impoverished and stunted. Granted, circumstances will sometimes be less than ideal for many. But man is not his circumstance. Man’s dignity rises above circumstance. Circumstance is the forge by which he becomes himself. In that achievement, he attains happiness and peace. The ancient Roman adage is apposite: Ad astra per aspera (To the stars through hard sacrifice).

DEI’s Equity is a violation of justice. Men of common sense recognize that every society will always be marked by inequality. All human work is compensated unevenly, depending upon the nature of the work. This is the nature of justice. The bricklayer’s profession is no less worthy than a neurosurgeon. That fact is not compromised by the fact that compensation for them is unequal. Equality is not measured in outcomes but by opportunity. Aristotle once remarked that the greatest inequality is to treat unequal things equally. In a truly just society, the bricklayer understands that true justice lies in the greater compensation for the neurosurgeon. In fact, he would have it no other way. You see, he is grounded in reality. Inequality is not remedied by more inequality.

DEI’s Inclusion is a corruption of charity. Discrimination entails arbitrary exclusion, a vicious expulsion of some by virtue of some physical trait or disposition. But discrimination grounded upon the exigencies of the task at hand is obligatory. If an individual cannot meet with distinction the expectations required of him, charity requires he be bypassed by one who can. T.S Eliot wrote in “Ash Wednesday,” “teach us to care, and not to care.” Puzzling at first glance. But his poetry expresses the rich teaching of Mother Church recently given unexpected currency by Vice President Vance. 

In citing the ordo amoris, he reintroduced the remarkable textures of love. It is not an undifferentiated thing, like a plain white wall. It is more like a kaleidoscope of rich colors. If those textures are not respected, love becomes a caricature. Gross violations of charity arise if an individual is admitted into a position without proper qualification. Not only is the profession harmed but those better qualified become this victim of lack of charity.

Yes, a Catholic must care for the “stranger.” But caring for the “stranger” becomes a vice if it entails not first caring for one’s family, or the common good of one’s nation.  

“Teach us to care, and not to care,” indeed.

We well deserve to rejoice at the beginning of the end of our captivity.  

But if we are not vigilant, the captivity will return. And with a vengeance.